It was a privilege to be asked by The Register for our Managing Director, Simon Birney to participate in a panel in a live webcast to share his expertise on the challenges businesses face with the rapid pace of changing IT and the drive to increase agility, performance and simplicity to increase their business capabilities. Watch below as the panel discuss public vs private clouds, software defined, billing and costs and yes, SSD does creep in there somewhere.

REGISTER NOW No IT environment is an island. You’ve done what you can to manage your core applications and services, things are running relatively smoothly but you’ve reached the point where there’s not much more efficiency you can gain. At the same time, the business is looking at how it can extend how it uses technology — providing more interactive customer experiences, making better use of external and cloud services, delivering on its innovation goals. So, what do you do next? A number of options exist beyond this point, based on public and private cloud, software stacks and services, in-house...

Why consider DRaaS at all? Companies are looking to Disaster Recovery as a Service to deliver improved recovery time and recovery point objectives over the traditional methods of disaster recovery. With some of the inhibiters to Cloud adoption being concerns around the security and reliability of the service for live environments, many organisations are considering storing data and recovering servers in the Cloud as a ‘toe in the water’ before committing to a wider Cloud implementation of their IT systems. DRaaS – then and now Initially there was a proliferation of Cloud-based IT providers launching DRaaS branded offerings who had...

Where have cloud infrastructure services come from? Around a decade ago, server virtualisation started to drive huge levels of consolidation and efficiencies within private infrastructure. Traditional service providers were also able to benefit from better economies of scale and easier provisioning of new services. These sorts of scenarios are now typically referred to as private cloud (whether on-premise or hosted). Meanwhile, Amazon, Microsoft and Google were developing their own purpose-built offerings with proprietary, highly scalable architectures delivering consumer-grade consumption models and the ability to rapidly on-board customers. Fast-forward ten years and with the label of “public cloud services”, it’s clear...

The IT world is undoubtedly heading towards greater levels of automation. If we look at what has happened in the past within other industries (manufacturing is an obvious one) it seems like an inevitable evolution in order to drive efficiencies and grow economies of scale. IT systems are becoming more and more complex in order to deal with the exponential increase in workload and required functionality. In my view, vendors who can hide that complexity from the end user without sacrificing functionality or flexibility are more likely to succeed (or survive depending on your perspective). While we have seen some...

When talking to customers about how they protect their data it’s often a case of “don’t mention the ‘B’ word”. – Backup – there, I said it. However, anyone taking a quick glance at the industry press (and indeed social media) shows that this is becoming more of a hot topic these days. I find that the focus, however, is shifting from ‘backup’ to proving data and service recovery. Organisations now expect all-round data protection – not just of key systems but all applications. In this modern, fast-paced world, IT departments needs to react quickly to recover services in the...